Measuring the Power of State Legislative Leaders
42 Pages Posted: 27 Aug 2014
Date Written: 2014
Abstract
The influence majority party leaders have over legislative outcomes is central to many theories of the legislative process. As yet, however, we have no satisfactory measure of their influence for state legislatures and Congress to use in testing our theories. Two quite different approaches have been used to measure majority leader powers—perceptual surveys and indices of leaders' formal powers. Yet, these two types of measures show little correlation with each other. This raises important questions about exactly what each approach is measuring, and more fundamentally about our understanding of the nature of leaders' powers. First, we use results of a pilot survey of the powers of legislative leaders to explicate the relationships between leaders’ perceptual and formal powers. Second, we consider how to improve perceptual measures using existing surveys. We use a Bayesian hierarchical model to estimate the influence of majority party leaders in each of their chambers using the 2002 survey. At the individual level we include variables to control for response bias and at the chamber level we include a variety of explanatory, indicator and control variables.
Keywords: legislative leaders, legislatures, state politics
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